Dining on Stones Page 4

  Rainham Marshes

  The girl Track had disappeared. On the marshes. After searching for thirty or forty minutes, until the rain forced us back to the car, we left her to it, retreated to a truckers’ café in Thurrock. Track did this all the time, Livia said. Jimmy, in loco parentis, was unfazed. Track was five years older than his current wife. She’d grown up on European art cinema, Monica Vitti stalking Lea Massari. In her Oxfam way, the American was a bit of a drama queen. Right set, right reaction: absence.

  In Hackney it was cats. Nailed to trees, photocopied portraits. Rewards. People didn’t disappear, not for a second time: they were the disappeared, it was their vocation. Bodies showed up in parks and squares, killers vanished. Crimes were unsigned, uncredited. Random conjunctions inspired by the location. Women, men too, travelled to the coast if they wanted to shed their identities. You saw the faces, years older, in shop windows.

  Track was a premature ghost. You couldn’t pull this number on Rainham Marshes. Nobody would notice.

  Monica Vitti, so Track had informed us, when we sidled, collars up, around a breakers’ yard, got her start dubbing an actress called Dorian Gray in Antonioni’s gloomy Po Valley drama, Il Grido. Echoes of echoes of echoes. A counterfeit name for a forgotten performer. Oscar Wilde’s fable twisted: a production still staying forever young and enigmatic in a film buff’s attic, while the freckled sleepwalker Vitti (who always seemed to be taking instruction, a few beats after the event, from an earpiece disguised by a lustrous tumble of hair) succumbs, in gentle increments, to the pull of mortality.

  Out on the road, Jimmy’s spirits lifted; he understood precisely how to play the part of the man at the wheel. Humming, tapping his coin, doing the voices: a replay of last night’s television, a documentary about a stuntman who’d broken every bone in his body, but who kept on pushing it, wilder and wilder outfits. Clenched fist, cigar in mouth, as they wheeled him away on the gurney; wink for the camera. Jimmy, his biker days behind him, was impressed by the fatalism, leather and tassels, of this once dirt-poor hillbilly. An Appalachian astronaut who jumped buses, took flight across canyons, hurtled to earth. A gravity addict. The absence of a helmet that would interfere with an exquisitely engineered hairstyle, raven black and aerodynamic, was a red badge of stupidity. But what Jimmy liked best in the film were the empty roads, dawn shots of a dusty nowhere, the clapboard whistlestop where the stuntman grew up. Coal heaps, coal dirt as a filter. Lone dogs picking at road-kill in the parking lots of drive-in convenience stores.

  Half listening, I could tolerate Jimmy’s monologue, float it across the aspirant-Americana of the A13. New Jersey’s reed beds translated to Newham: sideflash of carney show Millennium Dome. Marginal enterprises (failed) giving way to hopeless future projects, retail suburbs, development scams, ski slopes sculpted from toxic waste, the inflorescence of entropy. (With his spare hand Jimmy snapped a high-rise trio on the outskirts of Dagenham, seen from a flyover, pale sun rising, downriver, beyond Ford’s water tower and the pylon forests.) Heroic English cottages, grace-and-favour for workers in the motor plant, were terraced hard against the sub-motorway, this sluggish tributary of London’s orbital hoop, the M25. Front windows were boarded over. The back gardens, in the days when these dwellings were habitable, concealed the front door, the way in. You learnt to live with noise, dirt. You looked north, away from the river, towards the slopes of the Epping Forest fringe, the Italianate tower of Claybury Mental Hospital.

  Jimmy’s immodest canvases, stacked in his Hackney lock-up, were a memory bank for everything that was missing, damaged or destroyed: gangland pubs where retired dockers talked contraband with chalky villains, swollen knuckles, liver spots, back from a seven in Parkhurst. Carpets of scrunched up betting-slips. Metal ashtrays from which the ash could never be rinsed (nobody tried). Size implied defeat. Caverns for excursionists who weren’t there. Riverside palaces of ruined gilt occupied by two or three old men, leaking smoke and watching the door. If these pubs aren’t taken over by ravers, for all-night noise fests, they’re finished. Abandoned to Jimmy and his swollen replicas.

  Track and Livia disregarded the low macho of the stuntman replays, they looked out of the window, passed soft-voiced comments, noticing things. Jimmy needed an audience, needed us with him: he switched to a Los Angeles murder mystery, the reinvestigation of a slasher crime. He did Nick Nolte, drunk, table-hopping with a bunch of homicide cops at a reunion in a Chinese restaurant; Nick’s fame-clubbed head too heavy for his shoulders. Jimmy did the obscenities, panty-sniffing creeps, masturbating peepers, Vice Squad jokes with canned laughter. And he did them with furtive glances in the driving mirror.

  I suggested, feeling the first pangs of hunger, that we come off-road at Rainham. The Thames marshes, bordered by semi-legit businesses, Portakabins, slavering dogs, were a lacuna Jimmy could effortlessly exploit: a bit of fence, rubbish lorries hiccuping down an unclassified highway. A single striking object – concrete barge, bridge disappearing into the clouds, motorbike wheel peeking out of sluggish stream – would be enough, a focal point for the composition. The rest was suggestion. A sprayed undercoat, a bucket of emulsion, detail touched in with a fine brush.

  ‘Like welding,’ Jimmy said. ‘The garage. Everything comes back to that. Access boredom and march right through it.’ Five hours a day, radio blaring. Knock off in time to pick up the kids. Evenings free to network, go on the piss. Even if the binge lurched on for a week and Jimmy woke up in a flat above a barber shop in Portsmouth, he never failed to bring home the numbers. Mobile and ex-directory. Name, rank: neatly inked on the flapping cuff of his once-white shirt. Antony Gormley. Man from Tate Modern. That architect who does the long, thin glass coffins, shoehorned into cracks between Clerkenwell lofts. Woman from Modern Painters. Howard Jacobson, Will Self and Rowan Moore, the journalist whose brother is the editor of …

  We pulled up broadside to a phone kiosk that some humorist had slapped down in the middle of nothing. The police car that had been trailing us, since the mountain of multicoloured container units (we clambered out with our cameras), cut across our bows in a whip of dust and rubber. The driver yawned, his oppo tapped on Jimmy’s window. ‘Where do you come from?’ ‘What are you?’ ‘Where are you going?’ The second question being the tough one.

  The uniform talked to Jimmy and stared at the girls. I did my halfwitted, middle-class TV researcher act, flashing a laminated ID card (Apollo Home Entertainment, Bethnal Green Road). They weren’t interested. What we hadn’t noticed – preoccupied with extreme manifestations of local colour – was the distant line of beaters working their way towards us across the mud flats. Wellington bootmarks filling with yellow squitter. Nuisanced crows perched on wire.

  The search was now in its critical third day, a schoolgirl from Purfleet reported as missing: last seen at the bus stop, 8.30 a.m., grey flannel skirt, blue jersey, no coat. Fourteen years old: no form, no suspect connections. An occasional clubber at ‘Tuesdays’ in Basildon. Tuesdays: as in ‘shut on’. Apostrophe sacrificed in homage to Ms Weld, the peppy ingénue of Rally Round the Flag, Boys, the depressed mom of Heartbreak Hotel. Clubland in Essex had slithered down the fantasy casting couch from Marilyn (shaking it for Jack) to Raquel (fur bikini) to Teen Queen surf bimbos (sub-Corman). Weld deserved better. In her day she was pretty good. We were the same age, but we’d matured at different speeds. She got to play Scott Fitzgerald’s wife round about the time I was scratching dog shit from the base of the pyramid in Limehouse Church. In the film dictionaries you’ll find her between Johnny Weissmuller and Orson Welles.

  Sad that Tuesday had become estuary slang, mouthed by groups of young males, on walls, on bikes, shouting after schoolgirls. ‘See you next Tuesday.’ C-U-N-T.

  The Basildon club was the kind of place where they employed bouncers to chuck you in. To keep you wired. Blood flowed, at the burger stall in the early hours, when grudges were sorted; cold night air, big men with small psychoses, rucks over minicabs and gash. The local filth w
ere so bent, there was no point in putting them on the payroll. They paid you, for part of the action. They stored excess stock, drugs and porn. You worked for them, if you were lucky, as a salaried distributor.

  Beyond the cordon of police and volunteers, searching the wetlands with their sticks and poles, we saw, as the rainbelt moved on, the full span of the QEII Bridge: a set of silver dentures. Traffic stalled on the M25. Incident, accident, weight of numbers overwhelming the Dartford poll booths.

  The police car put on its siren and flashing blue lights. I watched it race away down the long straight road, shuddering over bumps, swerving and flashing to warn off the convoy of approaching landfill lorries. The secret cargoes of London.

  Livia found a piece of engine, submerged in the claggy ground: cut hoses, valves, cables. The lumpy metal heart looked like something ripped from a living body, by surgeon or contract killer. The young woman brushed away mud. She stroked the proud letters of the manufacturer’s name with her naked fingers, before lifting the specimen up to her face and sniffing it.

  ‘Livia, no,’ Jimmy warned. ‘Use the camera. We’re artists, not dealers in scrap metal. The boot’s full.’

  The formal description of this thing – size, weight, odour – went into a moleskin sketchbook. Hand-drawn panels. Like a Manga strip, an angry Japanese comic. A machine brought to life by a woman’s love. Oil for blood. The soul-meat of a murdered android. Only then did Livia use her camera. For the final rites, before Jimmy tossed the abortion into the creek.

  ‘Breakfast now. Ahead of that mob from over the river. That’s where Track will have gone, you’ll see. The café.’

  The Log Cabin at West Thurrock was long and low, hanging baskets dressing a theme park timber facade. Narrow bays for rep cars out front, space at the back for the white vans and lorries that served the riverside industrial units: soap, petrol, paper.

  The interesting thing, as the three of us faced up to the consequences of ordering up numbers, heavy platters of beans, bacon, airfixed sausage, blind egg, tin-flavoured tomato, grease raft of fried bread, was that Jimmy, in his PLASTERCASTER T-shirt and black leather waistcoat, was comprehensively discommoded by the scale and immediacy of the feast. The Glaswegian hardman, beetling eyebrows, red-gold fleece of thinning hair, hadn’t been inside a workman’s caff for years. And it showed. His hand trembled as he reached for a fork.

  ‘Christ,’ he said, puncturing the sawdust-and-pig’s-foot condom, ‘is this thing still alive? I don’t, I can’t, I mustn’t …’

  Pink-cheeked Livia, having wolfed down the potent slop, salty strips of doctored meat substitute, was wiping her plate, a clover leaf of thick scarlet smear. ‘Good,’ she said. ‘Very good.’ She burped. Jimmy amused her.

  ‘I sold my soul to join the fucking middle classes,’ the painter moaned. ‘You’re wiping years off my CV, I mean it. Dragging me back to the gutter. Phowarrr! Sorry. I’ve got to drop one. The beans. I haven’t seen one of those plastic sauce dispensers since I was in New York.’

  ‘You don’t seem very bothered about your friend, about Track,’ I said to Livia. While Jimmy lurched up the aisle, running the gauntlet of scornful tabloid-grazers who took their tea in pint pots. Signature flatus lost in the amnesty of rain-fug and fry-up, loosened belts and squeaky seats. A veil of cigarette smoke and steam from donkey jackets.

  ‘Happens all the time. She calls it: “my fugue”. Jimmy thinks it’s attention-seeking. He’s wrong.’

  Livia didn’t look at me when she spoke. She was staring out of the window, head on hand, patterns made by raindrops in the accumulated grease, human leakage.

  ‘Why?’

  Livia rummaged in her satchel.

  ‘I thought I had a photograph. Wrong bag,’

  ‘Of what?’

  ‘Marina. Marina is Track’s great passion. Marina is ahead of the game. A studio – in Dagenham? A residency in Grays, paid for by the riverside developers, to come up with an essay on Conrad in Stanford-le-Hope. A creative-writing fellowship at the Bloomberg Centre. You know that place in Finsbury Square? “London’s first post-paper environment,” Marina called it. Curtains of floating images. Live-feeds from the seaside washing under your feet. Banks of monitors in every pillar. 24-hour cable transmission into worldwide financial centres: liquid art. Bloomberg wanted writers without writing, text as presence. So Marina used books like computers. Slim, elegant ones: Beckett, Borges, late DeLillo. Flip the lid and read vertical word-columns as prophecy. “They saw his glasses melt into his eyes.” Marina filmed books. She would stand there, behind one of the pillars, watching them watching her work. DeLillo fables about men losing billions of dollars. No future. The poetry’s been left out. Marina is a poet.’

  ‘Marina who?’

  ‘Marina Fountain.’

  ‘Where is she now?’

  ‘Postcard last week: a ship burning on a beach. Other than that, nothing. Could be anywhere. Track thinks that if she walks out of the story somewhere around the area where Marina was last seen, she’ll find her – by mimicking her actions. Psychogeographical possession.’

  I sighed. Too old for this stuff.

  ‘Another coffee?’

  Our chauffeur hadn’t reappeared. Jimmy was the latest disappearance, groaning in the Portakabin out back; horrified by where he found himself, an empty soap dispenser, a hot-air blower that didn’t blow. Piss stains on the soft suede of his desert boots. Holes in the floor.

  ‘Actually,’ Livia muttered, when I was already on my feet, heading for the counter, mugs in hand. ‘Marina used your road book’ – I sat down again – ‘for her Bloomberg piece.’

  ‘What road book?’ I hadn’t written about roads. What did I know about roads? The A13, it’s true, was a possible future project – but I’d kept pretty quiet about that.

  ‘The one about Lakeside, Chafford Hundred, Essex gangsters, Dracula’s abbey, bullion robberies. The walk.’

  ‘I’ve never, ever been inside the perimeter of Lakeside. Ikea is a four-letter word that brings me out in a cold sweat.’

  It was crazy, this woman was describing a book I was incapable of writing. Another jolt of caffeine-scum on watered milk might do the trick.

  ‘Marina left a folder of stories. She asked me, when she heard you were doing a piece on Jimmy, to show them to you. I could bring them round if you like. To your house?’

  This was altogether too much. The face, innocent of distinguishing features, of the woman behind the counter, was a relief. I basked in her aura. Her physicality. The way she moved and talked and knew herself. It went with the décor. Basic transactions: request, cash, ticket, coffee. Wet windows. Hiss of frying bacon. Steam from a kettle. Radiant horseshoe (white light within blue) of a shoulder-level heating device. Mute TV giving out pictures of traffic jams, rain on the road. Jukebox synthesising sunshine, beach bars, golden sands.

  ‘Hello, love. What’s it this time?’

  ‘Two coffees, please.’

  ‘Gone off of us? You ain’t been in this week. You found another woman then? You hear, Den? The prof’s found another woman.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Research, your mate said. The TV. You’re going to put us on television.’

  Openmouthed, she laughed. Shook.

  ‘I’ve never been in Thurrock before. I’ll be back for sure.’

  Her Lana Turner bosom agitated the tight sweater. Hooped earrings jangled.

  ‘Hear that, Den?’ She said to the cook, the flame-eater in the string vest. ‘What never been in? That’s your second this morning, mate. I said to Den, “Where’s he bleedin’ put it?” Full English twice over. I thought you was back cos you fancied me.’

  She turned to scoop three portions of freshly singed toast from the machine, to scoop margarine from a catering pack.

  Toast. Number 12. Number 12, your toast’s done.’

  Something was dripping into my coffee, staining it. The plipplipplip of raindrops from the overhanging greenery. I rubbed my chin, blood coursed and
spouted. I stared into the steamed mirror with the Coca-Cola logo. A small shaving-nick was pumping out absurd quantities of very red blood. And this on a morning when I hadn’t shaved. I couldn’t accept the evidence of my own eyes. I took off my glasses to get a closer look. When I tried to stretch the sockets, achieve sharp focus, clear this milky softness, I succeeded in smearing more blood across my cheeks. Turning an everyday, slightly bemused, slightly weary expression into urban werewolf, cornered sex criminal. The Beast of the Marshes. They saw his glasses melt into his eyes.

  Coast

  At the high window, above Warrior Square, Kaporal shut one eye and then the other. The statue of Queen Victoria with the red traffic cone perched on her head slid left to right and back again. He was the director. The grey, sea-facing monarch looked like a Hobbit. Kaporal approved: surreal contrivances tempering anomie. This was the first time, in twenty years, that he’d lived in a room without a phone. A mobile. He had a TV but never switched it on. The view from the window was better than electricity. He had to believe that if he kept clear of the Old Town, the Stade, the beachfront winkle bars, arcades, clubs, he wouldn’t run into O’Driscoll, the Sleeman brothers or Phil Tock.

  Basildon villains weren’t troubled by Mafia memories. They never crossed water: Southend, not Margate. Canvey before Sheppey. If they couldn’t sort it, pliers and industrial meat-mincer, within forty-eight hours of the original insult, the supposed absence of respect was history. ‘Me bruwer, ‘e wouldn’t hurt a sparrer.’ Maybe. Good news for Bill Oddie and the twitchers of Rainham Marshes. But Alby Sleeman, with the fat neck, musculature overdeveloped to the point of deformity, buttonhole eyes drilled into a snowman, had plenty of harm, discriminations of dentistry, on offer for those who badmouthed his family and associates. His sponsors. Alby was old school: not merely illiterate but anti-literate, books were suspect (school, Borstal, greenpaint office of psychiatric assessor). Writers were worse. He’d top the lot of them, mincing ponces. Grasses. Weasels who bent the truth, stole the words out of your mouth and twisted them.